We are pleased to announce that we will soon start offering two flavors of Netflix Ice in an “as a service” way:

  • As an integrated part of our Teevity cloud costs analytics services for both the free and the premium SaaS Teevity offerings.
  • As a standalone service, through the AWS Marketplace. As simple as a SaaS solution, but without the cost-privacy concerns (since it runs on your own AWS account without any connection to us).

It’s the easiest way to run Ice and to get an always up-to-date version. If you are interested: http://ice.teevity.com/register/.

The code behind these two services is based off Teevity’s fork of the Ice project, which can be found on Github.

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What is NetflixOSS Ice ?

Last June, NetflixOSS released “Ice”, their cloud spend and usage analytics on GitHub which they've been using internally for a while.

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It’s a tool that’s mainly targetting DevOps and Dev folks, with a focus on:

  • Getting a detailed understanding of how much is spent, and on which services, on your AWS account(s), all through charts and filters
  • Giving feedback to teams on how much they have, or their project have, spent over a giving period of time

The way Netflix has been using this tool was presented at AWS re:Invent 2012 back in November by Watson Coburn and his colleagues. But the exact feature set of the version of Ice was unknown at that time.

How does Ice fit in the Cloud cost analytics landscape ?

Ice is somewhat different from the existing cloud cost monitoring solutions in that:

  • It’s focusing on a purely graphical analysis of cost and usage data
  • It doesn’t provide any cost optimizations recommendations
  • it’s purely based off the output of AWS billing engine and is not doing any cost simulation based on usage analysis.

And it goes further than the existing players in one interesting area: 

  • it offers the basis of what is needed to compute a “cost per unit of business” through a notion called “throughput”

It also has many extension points that Netflix is probably taking advantage off on its internal version and which can be used to extend the product.

After a careful analysis of the product, we think it has the potential to become a standard in detailed cloud costs analytics targeted at technical teams. So we have decided to invest and build on it. 

Very complementary to Teevity existing service

Ice is very complementary to Teevity’s existing service, which is mainly targeted at managers.

It makes a very natural extension to our existing feature set. And our goal has always been to target both the technical and the financial world and to create a cost related communication channel between them.

So expect to see more and more integration of Ice features inside the Teevity cloud cost analytics service in the months to come.

The easiest way to run Ice

Since 2012 when we’ve started building Teevity, we’ve heard customers who were concerned about privacy issue related to their cloud spending. And they were not keen on using a SaaS service to track and optimize their cloud costs.

In response to that, we have decided to start offering a “run in on your own AWS account” version of Ice that is a easy to use as a SaaS version.

If you want to start using Ice today (for just a few hours or in an always-on mode), without having to go through many technical steps, the easiest way to run it is here : http://ice.teevity.com/register/